Terra Incognita: The next time someone decides to invite Oz or Oron to speak, they shouldn’t waste time; they should cut to the chase and invite Barghouti himself.

Talkbacks (12)Assaf Harofeh Medical Center did something strange recently. It invited an author who dedicated and sent a copy of his book to a terrorist to speak at a ceremony for outstanding doctors. The doctors at Assaf Harofeh have often treated victims of terror.

On September 9, 2003 eight soldiers were killed and 32 wounded in a suicide bombing near the hospital entrance. So how did it come to invite a speaker who consorts with terrorists whose victims the doctors might treat? The answer is not simple. The author happens to be the country’s most famous writer, Israel Prize laureate Amos Oz. On March 16 Yediot Aharonot reported that Oz had sent a book to convicted Palestinian terror leader Marwan Barghouti. He had become aware that Meretz MK Haim Oron was in the habit of visiting Barghouti in prison, and Oz asked him to take a copy of his 2002 book A Tale of Love and Darkness. The book is a namedropping account of the author’s early life on Kibbutz Hulda, where he met many lions of the early Zionist movement. It also discusses his family’s successes, failures and passions.

Oz sent Barghouti an Arabic translation with the inscription: “This story is our story. I hope you read it and understand us better, as we attempt to understand you. Hoping to meet soon in peace and freedom.”

On March 24 it was announced that Assaf Harofeh had cancelled the affair. Reports noted that “a senior doctor threatened to disrupt the ceremony” if Oz attended. After the cancellation the “free speech” alarm was sounded. Haaretz reported that a senior doctor claimed“it is hard to believe that because of one doctor who has certain political opinions, they revoked Oz’s invitation to the conference... That’s political interference in hospital matters.”

Gideon Levy condemned the “really sick” hospital’s “censorship” and Soviet-style “witch-hunt,” adding: “Heaven forbid if Oz wants Barghouti to get to know us better. But in 2011 Israel, this was enough to provoke aggression and censorship. Now it isn’t just Barghouti who is labeled as a monster, but Oz, too.”

Levy called Oz “a middle-of-the-road, profoundly Zionist and patriotic author” who should make us all proud because his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Oz also “dares” to speak truth to power, writing in The New York Times in June that “Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea – a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians.

No idea has ever been defeated by force.”

I DON’T know what Oz’s personal feelings are for Barghouti. But the facts are clear. Barghouti was born in 1959 in a village north of Ramallah. He comes from a large, well-known Palestinian family. He joined Fatah at 15 and co-founded its youth movement. He was a long-time militant and student activist, eventually receiving both a BA and MA. During the second intifada he led Fatah’s most militant sections – Tanzim and the Aksa Martyrs Brigades. The brigades were responsible for killing more than 100 people, mostly civilians inside the Green Line, between 2001 and 2006. Barghouti was arrested in April 2002 and convicted of five counts of murder.

So why did Israel’s leading author support giving this man freedom? Why, furthermore, did a hospital invite such an author to speak? Why does it appear that only one leading doctor protested against this person giving the keynote speech? Why is it considered “political” to ban Oz, but not political to invite him? No one wants to censor Oz. He is entitled to his opinions. He can send his book to whomever he wants: Islamists, neo-Nazis, jailed members of the Ku Klux Klan, the African warlord Charles Taylor. But why must his opinion be forced upon doctors whose job is to save lives? Why must his opinions be forced upon public institutions, whether hospitals, high schools or universities? There is a fetishism in the support Barghouti receives. Oron is a major supporter. In a March interview he gave to Haaretz, the interviewer, Gidi Weitz, noted that “in the past few years, Oron has visited Hadarim Prison, in the center of the country, every few weeks to see his friend Marwan Barghouti.”

Oron believes Barghouti is a great supporter of the Israeli Left – a “super-significant figure” like a Nelson Mandela, a “partner for dialogue” who does not renounce his “right to an armed struggle.”

It seems to me that Oron and his friends support Barghouti partly out of a sense that history will judge them like it judged the Afrikaners who sat down with Mandela. They also support him because they believe only he can unify the Palestinians. But does it seem strange that within Israel there are so many wellknown, cultured, progressive Jewish voices who not only want to befriend a murderer but also believe it is important to unify Hamas and Fatah? Barghouti is a super-significant figure. But just because he can unify Palestinians doesn’t mean Jews should support him. It would be like Turks supporting the jailed Kurdish nationalist Abdullah Ocalan. It would be like the Palestinians supporting the release of Jewish nationalist settlers under the theory that only they can unify Israel against the Palestinians.

Oron and Oz work on behalf of the Palestinians to get Barghouti released. Oron calls Barghouti a “moderate,” but he is only moderate like Mussolini was moderate compared to Hitler or Lenin was moderate compared to Stalin. Barghouti is like summer at the North Pole; it is moderate compared to winter.

The next time someone decides to invite Oz or Oron to speak, they shouldn’t waste time; they should cut to the chase and invite Barghouti himself. At least that would be honest. And moderate.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Terra Incognita: A recipe for a big messBy SETH J. FRANTZMAN at the Jerusalem Posthttp://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=21334803/22/2011 23:43

The central problem with the intervention in Libya is the lack of a clear goal.

Talkbacks (8)Take two parts Muammar Gaddafi. Add one part rebellion and a pinch of African and Eastern European mercenaries. Season with UN and NATO air strikes and let simmer. That is the dish being brewed in Libya. Every day, more news of nonsense comes out of that country. It’s worth summing up some of it and contemplating the chances for failure in light of this half-hearted foreign intervention.

“War in the desert is warfare in its purest form.”

Such were the words of Gen. Kress von Kressenstein upon observing the 1917 battle of Gaza, in which the British used tanks against the German defenses.

But the rebellion in Libya is far from pure warfare.

The battle for Libya is between feeble rebel units that display much bravado to reporters but little in battle, and Gaddafi’s wishy-washy army.

Like the current conflict, World War II in Africa was a seesaw affair. In 1940 Italy – which occupied Libya – invaded British-occupied Egypt. But, like the Libyan rebels, the Italian army, despite its bravado, became bogged down and the British quickly beat it back toward Tripoli. In March 1941 the Axis forces, now reinforced with Erwin Rommel’s German units, overran the British and forced them back to Egypt, much like Gaddafi rolled back the rebels. The Germans surrounded several British units in Tobruk, near the Egyptian border, and laid siege to them for 240 days. In June 1942 Rommel once again defeated the British, this time forcing them to within 70 miles of Alexandria. But as we know, the war did not end there; the Germans were again driven back, this time for good.

AS IN the desert war, the Libyan conflict has lurched from crisis to crisis. In late February, sporadic protests turned into a genuine rebellion. Rebels captured arms in Benghazi, capital of eastern Libya. For two weeks it seemed that the Libyan regime was finished. Newspapers printed maps showing most of Libya in rebel hands. But things apparently were changing. After defections by some army units, Gaddafi brought in African mercenaries to bolster his dwindling cadre of loyalists. By March 5, his army had been reorganized, and he unleashed it against rebel forces around Tripoli.

There have been reports that Gaddafi’s offensive was bolstered by Eastern European mercenaries, who, unlike the African recruits, would have been familiar with Soviet equipment such as T-72 tanks. Whatever the case, by March 10 the government forces had recaptured Zawiya near Tripoli and Ras Lanuf, between Tripoli and Benghazi. By March 16, both Brega and Ajdabiya were in government hands.

The rebels have repeatedly made blustery statements. Just prior to suffering a string of defeats around March 10, they had given Gaddafi mere hours to leave the country. They have made claims regarding recruitment, describing enlistment drives that armed 5,000 men and then another 8,000. But rebel spokesman Abdel Hafiz Ghoga claimed on March 20 that 8,000 rebels had been killed in fighting. The rebels have boasted of receiving defectors who have brought over tanks and airplanes.

They possess at least a few warplanes, but one of them, a MiG-23, was shot down on March 19. They have fired rockets wildly and adorned themselves with belts of ammo to give the impression of being well-armed. They talk about receiving military aid from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. On March 16 it was reported that Khalifa Belqasim Haftar, a former Libyan commando officer, had returned to fight alongside the rebels.

But the rebels show little military prowess. Nonetheless, they received a boost on March 17, when the UN imposed a no-fly zone over Libya. On March 19 French planes began bombing Libyan tanks in the suburbs of Benghazi.

Further raids by British and American planes followed. So now the road for the rebels is once again open between Benghazi and Adjabiya.

BUT THE central problem with the intervention in Libya is its lack of a goal. It is not about killing Gaddafi: US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said it would be “unwise” to kill him, and UK Gen.

Sir David Roberts claims his country hasn’t targeted him because the UN does not permit such action.

It is not about helping the rebels: Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said there could very well be a stalemate in the aftermath of air strikes, and both President Barack Obama and British MPs have said there are no plans for ground troops. Justin Crump, a contributor to Al Jazeera on military affairs, correctly notes that airpower is not a panacea, and will almost certainly not be enough to tip the balance against Gaddafi.

The rebels seem incompetent. So unless the world is incredibly lucky, intervention there seems to be a recipe for a big mess. Unending conflict in Libya is not in the interest of anyone. With uncertainty already casting a pall over Egypt, Tunisia and increasingly over Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, and chaos having given rise to Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza, it can’t possibly be good to have a long stalemate in Libya which, until a few months ago, had the highest GDP per capita in North Africa, at around $14,000 (Israel’s is $29,000). Egypt and Morocco were less than half that.

Plunging a relatively wealthy country back into the dark ages, akin to Saddam’s Iraq between 1985 and 2005, is not good either. And getting Libyans hooked on foreign aid, like Kosovo, East Timor, Haiti, Gaza and some African countries, will also spell trouble.

The dish being prepared in Libya needs to be tossed out in favor of a more positive future.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Is this country so bereft of good people that none can be found who doesn’t describe Jews as ‘apes’ or compare Jewish politicians to Nazis?

How low did things have to get so that the Israel Prize – the country’s highest civilian honor – is routinely awarded to people who feel outright contempt for their fellow citizens? One was reminded of this last week, when it was revealed that singer Yehoram Gaon had said of Mizrahi music: “It’s rubbish that even the devil didn’t create.”

His comments were tame compared to those by prize laureate Natan Zach, who last year described Sephardi Jews as cave dwellers on national television.

Since its inception in 1953, the prize has been awarded to individuals in a variety of categories such as culture, sciences, the humanities and special contributions to the nation. Over the years more annual prizes have been awarded (14 in 2010), for a total of 633. Several people received the prize twice, and one – architect Ram Karmi – was the brother and son of recipients. Beginning in the 1990s, numerous anti-Israel people have received the prize.

Controversy began in 1992, when the Arab nationalist and communist Emile Habibi received the prize. The nomination caused scientist Yuval Neeman to return his.

Awarding the prize to people who don’t like Israel was inaugurated by education minister Shulamit Aloni in 1992 (she also received the prize in 2000). Aloni has declared that this is an apartheid state in the online magazine Counterpunch (January, 2007). She compared Yitzhak Rabin to Mussolini in 1989 and Binyamin Netanyahu to Joseph Goebbels in 1999.

The next controversial person to almost receive it was Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the philosophy professor who called this a “Judeo-Nazi” state. However, he declined the prize.

In 1997 the prize was almost awarded to Ma’ariv columnist Shmuel Shnitzer, who had written an article in 1994 entitled “Importing Death” (sometimes translated as “Importing Blood”), in which he argued that Ethiopian Jews were “thousands of apostates carrying dangerous diseases.” His nomination was only blocked by the High Court.

Aloni was given the prize in 2000 by her Meretz Party colleague Yossi Sarid when he was serving as education minister. No one asked whether there was a conflict of interest. In 2003 the prize was awarded to artist Moshe Gershoni, who refused to accept it because he didn’t want to shake hands with prime minister Ariel Sharon or education minister Limor Livnat.

In 2004 Yuval Tumarkin, a sculptor, received the prize. Tumarkin described religious Jews as “a mob... [of] primitives and monkeys... When one sees the haredim, one understands why there was a Holocaust.” oroccan Jews were “descended from a nation of primitive parasites.”

In 2005 Alex Levac, famed photographer of the bus 300 affair, received the prize. He said after that “although the prize was given to me by the officialdom, they are not the ones who choose me” – an apparent reference to his respect for the cultured members of the selection committee. He accepted his prize despite his revulsion at the “officials” who gave it to him.

Prof. Ze’ev Sternhell received the prize in 2008 despite a 2001 column in Haaretz in which he suggested that “there is no doubt about the legitimacy of armed resistance in the territories themselves. If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would concentrate their struggle against the settlements... and refrain from planting bombs west of the Green Line.”

NOT EVERYONE has stood silently by while the prizes were given to Israel-haters. Writer Carol Novis compared rewarding a prize to unsavory characters to appreciating Wagner, who was a great artist and a bad man. Uri Avnery went further, arguing that those who stirred controversy by getting the prize should be happy not to receive it, for the real prize is that they are moral people standing against the state. Jerusalem Post columnist Jonathan Rosenblum condemned the continuing awarding of the prize to intolerant individuals. But this misses the point.

Is Israel so bereft of good and brilliant people that none can be found who has contributed greatly to arts and culture and who doesn’t describe Jews as “apes” or compare Jewish politicians to Nazis? Why did Aloni receive the prize but not Shimon Peres or Menahem Porush? Perhaps when it comes to the latter it is because the prize has almost never been awarded to a religious Jew (let alone a Sephardi one).

Jews from Muslim countries make up a third of the population, yet, by my own estimate, only about 2 percent of Israel Prizes have gone to them. Unfortunately, the prize is generally awarded to people from a very narrow, selfappointed elite. In these circles it seems that comments about Sephardim being “from caves” and haredim being “monkeys” are acceptable. No member of this elite seems to recall which culture produced the Holocaust.

YUVAL NEEMAN was right to return the prize; it has become, like some Groucho Marx joke, a club to which one would not want to belong.

The fact that people like Zach are only “outed” as racists years after receiving the prize doesn’t say much. If they describe Sephardim as cave-dwellers on national television, what do they do in private? If they write in a major paper that Ethiopian Jews are disease-ridden, what curses must they hurl in the company of friends? And it’s not about “freedom of speech.” The freedom of Zach and Tumarkin to hate other Jews is not in question; they are welcome to wallow in their sewer of hate. It’s just that a sewer shouldn’t deserve an award for being the best cesspool on the block.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

The long-running attachment West had to Gaddafi puts in perspective the subsequent lack of interest in rebels now fighting his tyranny.

Can someone tell me why the world’s press rushed to Tahrir Square in Cairo and cooed about how wonderful that uprising was, yet cares little for Libya?

By all standards, the Libyan situation seems more heroic. Photos show jury-rigged pickups with anti-aircraft guns mounted atop them to shield the protesters from Muammar Gaddafi’s Russian-made aircraft. They show old men waving antique rifles and swords while fighting marauding gangs of mercenaries who shoot into crowds. Isn’t all that more courageous than the protesters at Tahrir who, for the most part, were not harmed on such a large scale?

But there are few op-eds waxing poetic about Libyan freedom fighters. Nicholas Kristof, the inveterate New York Times columnist, is a good example. He wrote four laudatory columns between February 1 and 6 about Egypt. They included “Exhilarated by hope in Cairo” and “We are all Egyptians.”

But on Libya he was bored, noting on February 24 that “it’s time to nudge Col. Muammar Gaddafi from power.”

Nudge? And on March 2 he really got down to business with, “Let’s ratchet up the pressure toward a peaceful outcome.”

Such strong language!

Kristof is typical of a malaise about Libya. Is it really just because the press got used to rebellion in the Middle East? It seems that the big yawn is more about the fact that Libya doesn’t fit the right model. Gaddafi is an anti- Western socialist in the mold of Fidel Castro, an exotic part-time crazy person. He banged his fists at the UN; he carted around a big Beduin tent that he forced countries to allow him to pitch where he pleased. He postured and posed in robes that seemed like they came from the set of a movie about 1970s pimps. He wasn’t a fat, US-funded dictator and friend of Israel.

Because, for all the talk about how the Egyptian revolution wasn’t about Israel, there sure were a lot of headlines in the Economist, BBC and New York Times about how Israelis were sourpusses for not celebrating the downfall of Mubarak.

Had Gaddafi been the best friend of the Jewish state, would we not be hearing more about the inspiration of the Arabs throwing off the dictator? Or had he been some Western- supported regime, like Mubarak, with US airplanes bombing the protesters, wouldn’t there be some huge outcry about the “propped-up dictator” murdering Arabs in the street?

WE WILL never know why Libya didn’t inspire. We won’t ever know why Palestinians with slingshots and checkered keffiyehs make people weak in the knees, while the same people 1,000 miles away are boring.

But the lack of romance hides a more intriguing question: Why, for decades, did so many people and countries collaborate with the barbaric regime in Tripoli? I’m not speaking only of business interests like British Petroleum, but politicians, prominent leftist activists, academics, human rights programs and universities. The latest scandal involves the London School of Economics, which accepted $488,000 from Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam. Saif also received a doctorate from LSE, which is now being probed for plagiarism and was invited to give a speech at the university in 2010. Reports noted that he declared democracy to be the best system of government for his country.

But the ties between the LSE and Gaddafi are only the tip of a giant iceberg.

The West was wooed by Gaddafi after 9/11, when the regime attempted to portray itself as fighting Islamic terrorism. After the 2003 Iraq War, Gaddafi ostentatiously abandoned a nuclear weapons program. In murky dealings that are still not clear, the Scottish government released the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Mughrabi, in 2009 because he was supposedly dying of cancer. Mughrabi was given a hero’s welcome in Libya, and is still alive. Now it appears the UK government had some underhanded role in that release.

But releasing terrorists and giving the crooked sons of a dictator PhDs isn’t enough. The UN time and again gave Gaddafi a stamp of approval, first in 2003 when Libya was elected leader of the UN Commission on Human Rights. In 2010, 155 countries voted to put Libya on the Human Rights Council. Just prior to that event Ali Treki – a Libyan diplomat – was elected president of the UN General Assembly. This, despite the fact that he said in a 1983 speech: “Is it not the Jews who are exploiting the American people and trying to debase them? If we succeed in eliminating that entity, we shall by the same token save the American and European peoples.”

But why would a raving anti-Semite not head part of the UN, and a brutal dictatorship not be in charge of human rights?

Leading celebrities time and again patronized the Gaddafi family. Usher, Nelly Furtado, Beyonce and Mariah Carey all performed at lavish parties for them. When Gaddafi was in Italy in June of 2009, he asked to meet 1,000 prominent Italian women. And, no surprise, they came in droves to sit and listen to the dictator, much like Columbia University lapped up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech in 2007.

According to one report, “there were leading figures from politics, culture and industry; ministers posed for cameras, lawyers talked earnestly... in their seats and reality TV personalities blew kisses across the aisles.”

Human Rights Watch has been accused of “marketing Gaddafi” by praising his son Saif for creating “an expanded space for discussion and debate.”

Groups of activists, including Israeli- Arab MK Haneen Zoabi, have made pilgrimages to Tripoli.

The long-running attachment the West had to Gaddafi puts in perspective the subsequent lack of interest in the rebels now fighting his tyranny. Gaddafi and his henchmen should never have been given a pulpit at the UN, in Italy, at the LSE, or anywhere else, and hopefully sooner rather than later the rebels will remove them from power.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Things are always ‘exploding’ or ‘ticking’ or ‘being pushed toward an uprising’ or ‘civil war’ in this country.Talkbacks (5)If this country were a coal mine, it would be full of canaries. The canary is, so we are told, especially sensitive to noxious gas, so when it stops singing, it means disaster is coming. There are lots of canaries here. They sing and sing, but they don’t stop. Consider what they sing about.

The coming Druse intifada. In 2009, a group of Druse protested outside the Prime Ministers Office. According to reports “Hamud Jabar, the head of a Druse regional council in northern Israel, warned in remarks to Ynet that if the demands presented on Sunday are not met, the Druse may launch an intifada of their own, similar to the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel.”

The Druse demanded cancellation of taxes, and complained of budgetary discrimination.

One sign read: “A Druse is as good as a Jew in war, but when it comes to budgets, 10 Druse children are equal to one Jewish child.”

But it was the same in 2007. In that yearHaaretz ran a headline titled “A Druse intifada?” What prompted the accompanying article was an incident in Yirka in which a Jewish man, Ari Tal, appointed to run the local council, was abused and thrown out of the village, which was about NIS 68 million in debt. The reason was that only 14 percent of the residents paid taxes, and only 8% paid their electric bills. Yet the article noted that the village “has become one of the biggest shopping complexes in the North.”

As a message to the next person who might be appointed to run the village, a coffin was placed outside the municipality.

The statement was clear: let us run our own affairs, or else. The former council head, Rafik Salameh, claimed, “It’s impossible to protect him. And I fear that his arrival in the village will be the opening salvo of the Druse intifada.”

After riots in the Druse village of Peki’in in October 2007, more talk was heard about the coming “explosion.”

But it hasn’t happened, yet.

The imminent Negev Beduin uprising.

Because the government will not give the Negev Beduin some 800,000 dunams of land and won’t recognize their 50 illegally constructed villages there is, supposedly, an imminent danger they may rise up.

Most often in the news is the hamlet of al- Arakib – site of a few ramshackle structures that has become a hot spot in the Beduin squatting campaign. Month after month the Beduin settlers return, and month after month the Israel Lands Authority and police destroy the place.

MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al), who is a Beduin, claimed “the state is pushing its Beduin citizens to the point where they may launch a popular intifada, which will have severe results.”

In 2010 Haaretz noted: “It’s hard to understand why Israel is pushing a significant sector of its citizens toward extremism and crime.”

But we have heard it before. In 1998, Dr. Elie Rekhes of Tel Aviv University’s Program on Arab Policies warned The Jerusalem Post of a “Beduin intifada” unless urgent steps were taken. Am Johal reported on Antiwar.com in 2004 that people are “predicting a coming Beduin intifada.”

Muhammad Zeidan, head of the Arab Human Rights Association, noted “they are being pushed to do this.”

Max Marshall of the College of New Jersey called it “a ticking time bomb” in 2006. It’s still ticking, evidently.

The eventual boiling over of ‘mixed’ towns.

This is always a cause for concern. The “gentrification” or “Judaization” of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa, Lod and Acre is always, supposedly, pushing people toward an intifada. Kenneth Bandler writing at The Jerusalem Post noted last year that MK Haneen Zoabi was warning of a “third Palestinian intifada... this time the uprising will come from within Israel.”

Similar things were heard in 2007, after rioting by Arabs and Jews in Acre on Yom Kippur. In 2002, Effi Oshaya of the Labor Party warned of an Israeli-Arab intifada in an interview with a publication called Let’s Talk Peace.

WHAT ELSE is boiling over? Well, Gaza and the West Bank, to be sure. East Jerusalem: Meir Margalit claimed in these pages that “the daily humiliation suffered by residents is reaching a boiling point, and it’s only a matter of time until a conflagration erupts... the Arabs of east Jerusalem have been humiliated and trampled upon for years. Here too, patience is running out.”

He titled his article, “The 10 plagues of east Jerusalem.” He had written a similar article for Occupation magazine in 2009.

Then it was: “Several moves have made their lives unbearable and – the most difficult to bear – they feel their honor is being trodden underfoot.”

AND LEBANON. Egypt. Jordan. Things are always “exploding” or “ticking” or “being pushed toward an uprising.” The haredim, are they on the brink too? What of the foreign workers? And who recalls now all the talk of a “civil war” with the settlers? Remember the insights about “radicalization,” “alienation” and the “wild weeds.”

And the radical academics and anti-Israel crazies – are they also being “pushed” toward an intifada? We might be lucky the government doesn’t care too much. It means that grievances aren’t being addressed, but it also means officials don’t run around as if the sky is falling trying to fix problems partly of their own making.

Maybe there will be intifadas, but there’s very little that can be done about it except to abandon the Negev to squatters, stop asking Druse villages to pay taxes or relinquish control of east Jerusalem. And that won’t happen.

In coal mines, the canaries stopped singing when an explosion was actually imminent. Too bad human prognosticators aren’t as reliable. The least they could do is be quiet, but that too won’t happen.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Talkbacks (3)On January 20, sometime after nightfall a pretty, dark-haired, 19-year-old woman arrived at the Central Bus Station in Ramle. At the corner of Herzl and Bialik streets, she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the Jawarish neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of the town. She didn’t get very far. The taxi stopped at a light and a man from a neighboring car got out and shot her several times.

Initial news reports minimized and confused the story, saying she got shot while getting out of the taxi. Another early report made it seem like the bullet was a stray. Ramle is a rough town, and it seems that some people assumed this was just a tragic accident. Eventually it emerged that the woman, Alla Dahar, was a promising medical student and a resident of the upper-class neighborhood of Kababir in Haifa – a community composed of the tiny Ahmadiyya Muslim sect.

Within hours of her murder the police had arrested a suspect, Hassam Abu Ghanem, 24, a former boyfriend. It turns out Dahar was not a passive victim. She had complained to the police in Haifa in May that her boyfriend had threatened to kill her, and had assaulted her when she expressed a desire to study abroad. For 10 days the police did nothing. When they informed the police in Ramle of the complaint, the police there closed the file; by then, Dahar was already abroad, so why cause trouble?

Some people will be quick to say that the lack of police interest is entirely related to the Arab ethnicity of the people involved. But that’s not the whole story. It’s not the first time police received complaints from a woman, Jewish or Arab, about abuse and didn’t do anything. The police sometimes do embarrassingly little to investigate serious cases, as is clear from the story about Neta Blatt- Sorek, whose murder at the hand of terrorists at Beit Jimal was initially ruled a suicide.

THE REAL story about the Dahar murder is not just about police incompetence. It isn’t just about an enterprising young woman who wanted to make something of herself, and whose only mistake was to go out with the wrong man. It is also about the great and terrible stae of denial regarding ‘honor’ killings, and the conspiracy of silence and lies surrounding them. After Dahar was murdered her mother, Marwa, told the media her daughter had never been in a relationship with the suspect, or been threatened.

But ‘honor’ killings and denial in Ramle are a sort of national pasttime.

In 2007, 20 female relatives of the Abu Ghanem clan came forward to police with stories of a reign of terror in their neighborhood. The Abu Ghanems are a Beduin clan that moved to Ramle in the 1950s and number around 2,000 people. They dominate the Jawarish neighborhood.

Over an eight-year period, nine female members of the family had been murdered to defend “family honor.”

In 2008, Dalia Abu Ghanem, a 16- year-old mother, disappeared. In 2000 her mother had been murdered, and in 2006 her sister, who was 15, was also murdered. Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18, wanted to be a nurse. Instead, she was beaten by her brother in 2007, ostensibly because she refused an arranged marriage. She called the police, and they appear to have done nothing. Then she was murdered, shot nine times in bed.

Reem Abu Ghanem, 19, was strangled to death.

Murder after murder, a long line of blood and body bags for just one community. The women are buried in unmarked graves – typical of cases where “honor” is involved. But the public receives the story in a different way. In neighboring Lod (another mixed town), two women were murdered in October. In total 20 Muslim women were slain in Ramle and Lod between 2005 and 2010.

After the spate of murders in Lod there were protests. Not against the men doing the killing. Not against the culture of “honor” which values a woman less than a car. The protest was against the government. This was a typical line of approach to the murders in Lod: It’s all about neglect, a lack of investment in the police force and the Arab community.

Arab MKs led the way. Jamal Zahalka (Balad) said: “I am against sweeping anything under the carpet, and in our community – just like in any community – there are men who use violence against women for all sorts of reasons, especially to prove their masculinity.” Afo Agbaria (Hadash): “The media is always so quick to label these murders honor killings, but we have to take these words out of our lexicon because every murder of a woman must be viewed as a murder, and nothing more.” Ahmed Tibi (Raam Ta’al) suggested banning the use of the phrase “honor killing” when referring to these types of crimes, and making it easier for relatives to sue the newspapers that describe the killings this way.

THIS IS the state of denial. The police do very little to prevent these killings, because the Arab community won’t cooperate with them, they lack resources and they are, unfortunately, incompetent. The community claims the killings don’t even happen, it’s all “mistaken identity” (you might ask yourself here, why then so many men aren’t being gunned down by stray bullets and buried in unmarked graves). For the Arab leadership, the words should simply disappear. For the Jewish public it is about neglect, and it is the government’s fault.

The extreme sense of hopelessness and denial can be seen in the statement by one Arab woman from Lod to the media: “The minute the police describe a murder as an ‘honor killing,’ it severely damages [the reputation of] the family for generations to come.”

The tragedy of this point of view is palpable. Honor killings can be stopped. The first step should be the passage of a bill to make them like hate crimes and crimes involving criminal conspiracy in the US. This will provide special tools to prosecutors and the police. The criminals involved should receive twice, maybe three times the normal sentence for murder.

But it mustn’t end with enforcement. Women in Arab communities must be empowered to speak out, whether via better witness protection or more avenues, and to feel that their culture and hardships are understood and respected.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=209432

Things are always ‘exploding’ or ‘ticking’ or ‘being pushed toward an uprising’ or ‘civil war’ in this country.

Talkbacks (5)If this country were a coal mine, it would be full of canaries. The canary is, so we are told, especially sensitive to noxious gas, so when it stops singing, it means disaster is coming. There are lots of canaries here. They sing and sing, but they don’t stop. Consider what they sing about.

The coming Druse intifada. In 2009, a group of Druse protested outside the Prime Ministers Office. According to reports “Hamud Jabar, the head of a Druse regional council in northern Israel, warned in remarks to Ynet that if the demands presented on Sunday are not met, the Druse may launch an intifada of their own, similar to the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel.”

The Druse demanded cancellation of taxes, and complained of budgetary discrimination.

One sign read: “A Druse is as good as a Jew in war, but when it comes to budgets, 10 Druse children are equal to one Jewish child.”

But it was the same in 2007. In that year Haaretz ran a headline titled “A Druse intifada?” What prompted the accompanying article was an incident in Yirka in which a Jewish man, Ari Tal, appointed to run the local council, was abused and thrown out of the village, which was about NIS 68 million in debt. The reason was that only 14 percent of the residents paid taxes, and only 8% paid their electric bills. Yet the article noted that the village “has become one of the biggest shopping complexes in the North.”

As a message to the next person who might be appointed to run the village, a coffin was placed outside the municipality.

The statement was clear: let us run our own affairs, or else. The former council head, Rafik Salameh, claimed, “It’s impossible to protect him. And I fear that his arrival in the village will be the opening salvo of the Druse intifada.”

After riots in the Druse village of Peki’in in October 2007, more talk was heard about the coming “explosion.”

But it hasn’t happened, yet.

The imminent Negev Beduin uprising.

Because the government will not give the Negev Beduin some 800,000 dunams of land and won’t recognize their 50 illegally constructed villages there is, supposedly, an imminent danger they may rise up.

Most often in the news is the hamlet of al- Arakib – site of a few ramshackle structures that has become a hot spot in the Beduin squatting campaign. Month after month the Beduin settlers return, and month after month the Israel Lands Authority and police destroy the place.

MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al), who is a Beduin, claimed “the state is pushing its Beduin citizens to the point where they may launch a popular intifada, which will have severe results.”

In 2010 Haaretz noted: “It’s hard to understand why Israel is pushing a significant sector of its citizens toward extremism and crime.”

But we have heard it before. In 1998, Dr. Elie Rekhes of Tel Aviv University’s Program on Arab Policies warned The Jerusalem Post of a “Beduin intifada” unless urgent steps were taken. Am Johal reported on Antiwar.com in 2004 that people are “predicting a coming Beduin intifada.”

Muhammad Zeidan, head of the Arab Human Rights Association, noted “they are being pushed to do this.”

Max Marshall of the College of New Jersey called it “a ticking time bomb” in 2006. It’s still ticking, evidently.

The eventual boiling over of ‘mixed’ towns.

This is always a cause for concern. The “gentrification” or “Judaization” of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa, Lod and Acre is always, supposedly, pushing people toward an intifada. Kenneth Bandler writing at The Jerusalem Post noted last year that MK Haneen Zoabi was warning of a “third Palestinian intifada... this time the uprising will come from within Israel.”

Similar things were heard in 2007, after rioting by Arabs and Jews in Acre on Yom Kippur. In 2002, Effi Oshaya of the Labor Party warned of an Israeli-Arab intifada in an interview with a publication called Let’s Talk Peace.

WHAT ELSE is boiling over? Well, Gaza and the West Bank, to be sure. East Jerusalem: Meir Margalit claimed in these pages that “the daily humiliation suffered by residents is reaching a boiling point, and it’s only a matter of time until a conflagration erupts... the Arabs of east Jerusalem have been humiliated and trampled upon for years. Here too, patience is running out.”

He titled his article, “The 10 plagues of east Jerusalem.” He had written a similar article for Occupation magazine in 2009.

Then it was: “Several moves have made their lives unbearable and – the most difficult to bear – they feel their honor is being trodden underfoot.”

AND LEBANON. Egypt. Jordan. Things are always “exploding” or “ticking” or “being pushed toward an uprising.” The haredim, are they on the brink too? What of the foreign workers? And who recalls now all the talk of a “civil war” with the settlers? Remember the insights about “radicalization,” “alienation” and the “wild weeds.”

And the radical academics and anti-Israel crazies – are they also being “pushed” toward an intifada? We might be lucky the government doesn’t care too much. It means that grievances aren’t being addressed, but it also means officials don’t run around as if the sky is falling trying to fix problems partly of their own making.

Maybe there will be intifadas, but there’s very little that can be done about it except to abandon the Negev to squatters, stop asking Druse villages to pay taxes or relinquish control of east Jerusalem. And that won’t happen.

In coal mines, the canaries stopped singing when an explosion was actually imminent. Too bad human prognosticators aren’t as reliable. The least they could do is be quiet, but that too won’t happen.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.